Serve Or Fail

Reading with the Grain

I believe Eggers makes a good argument. I do think that many people that would give some of their time to help others would truely benefit from duing so, in many ways.  It is true that at first some might be reluctent to take a few hours of their down time, but many would quickly realize it will teach them many things on both a moral scale and real world experience, things you can’t learn from a text book.

Reading against the Grain

Like most arguments there are always two sides and Eggers argument is no exception.  There are many people that wouldn’t appreciate being forced to do something against their will. Which would mean some many people could easily lie their way out of having to do it and for the remaining that couldn’t they would still do as much as possible to make it a bad experience for themselves and others.  So the truth is forcing people to serve the community isn’t always going to benefit them. There are also the people that truely don’t have a lot of extra time and are already struggling to stay on top of their school work and many have jobs to help pay for the schooling in the first place, and they need that down time. 

Rhetorical Précis

In his article, “Serve or Fail” (2004), Dave Eggers argues that college students have too much time on their hands and should be doing something more productive with their free time, which in his opinion is serve a certain amount of time of community service. Eggers supports this by writing about he’s own personal experience in college on how invaluable the things he did during his down time were.   His purpose is to get more people to understand how valuable community service is and that more schools should make it a requirement in order to provide students with a real world, hands on experience. He uses a persuasive tone backed up with logical reasoning to get the attendion of his audience, which varies from the college students themselves to the educators.